Take on the Woke Entertainment Industry

Yes, Reactionary entertainment can be fun

Editorial note: Rule 10 is being delayed as I need to rewrite parts of it, and I’ve been busy on a Rule 2 project of my own. Since it has been over a month since my last post, here’s a bit more of Rule 2: Don’t just Boycott, Compete!

In the previous post I wrote a fair amount about toys, hobbies, and other leisure activities. In part this is because I am working from childhood memories. But the other part is also important: we need to loosen the grip Hollywood has on America's soul. When people rely too much on passive entertainment from centralized sources, movie, television, and sports stars become virtual friends and leaders to a very unhealthy degree.

Even a video game arcade is healthier than gaming at home for hours on end. It gets people together. Personally, I miss the abstract shapes and straightforward play of the old 8 bit games. And a robustly mounted joystick and durable fire buttons that you can smash with your fist are much more satisfying than a handheld controller that you operate with your thumbs. I, for one, think it would be cool to revive some classic games using bigger screens and better processors. Driving and fighter jet games could economically use multiple screens -- providing an experience you cannot get at home. I'd also emphasize games where people play against each other side by side, to emphasize the social aspect.

One common problem with coin op games is that they can be too expensive for beginners and too cheap for experts. One workaround would be to have the coins (or swipe cards) pay for time instead of lives. Another fix from the old machines would be to use an internal clock to seed the random number generator for each play. That way experts cannot memorize what the obstacles will do (a common trick for mastering the original PacMan game.)

But with all this said, people are still going to watch television and movies. It would be nice to have some with a modicum of American values, and to make the major studies pay dearly for trashing cherished franchises to appease the SJWs. But in this, as with other products, let's look backwards and see what other flaws in modern movies and television that we can fix.

For starters first run movies are expensive. Go back to the 1950s and movies tickets were about half the price of today adjusted for inflation. [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/08/29/cost-of-a-movie-ticket-the-year-you-were-born/39998123/] Real prices went up in the 1960s but only occasionally have they been as high as they are today. I don't know why prices went up in the 1960s, but I would note that most movies went to color during that era, and color film was significantly more expensive.

Today, one can make quality movies without any film whatsoever. Digital cameras are dirt cheap compared to the film tech of yesteryear. And directors can review the results of a take immediately, vs. waiting for film to be developed. This should reduce the number of takes required. Technically speaking, movies should be getting cheaper. (And maybe the equivalent of 1950s movies are being made cheaper. They just aren't shown in theaters; they go directly to cable channels, DVDs, and streaming services.) Also, you shouldn't need all that much makeup -- a real time waster. Actors needed caked on makeup for grainy black and white movies, otherwise their expressions would not show up. Actors also need makeup when doing stage shows in order for their expressions to be seen in the back rows. But with ultra high resolution digital photography, we see more details of the actors' faces than we would see in real life unless we were to do the Joe Biden hair sniffing thing.

So here's the question: is it possible to revive the old business model of the neighborhood theater, whose justification is to bring traffic to neighboring businesses as much as it is to sell tickets and terrible popcorn? Can you revive such a business model without vertically integrating movie production and theater ownership? Or can you legally vertically integrate if you are small enough to fly below the antitrust radar? These are questions I cannot answer.

So let's move on to content, regardless of medium. I can think of several neglected niches:

1. Halfway realistic action movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark was fun, but it ruined PG action movies in general. It set a ridiculous standard for number and absurdity of stunts that made most subsequent action movies too unrealistic to be exciting. Couple that with the MTV/Sesame Street school of quick cuts and most modern action movies have become garish light shows. The genre became dominated by Arnold Schwartzenegger and comic book superheroes because they are more realistic than action movies with real people. Arnold was a walking talking special effect, not fully human. It was possible to suspend disbelief when his characters did unbelievable things. Ditto for heroes with superpowers.

What doesn't work is having a chain smoking, hard drinking metrosexual as a one man army. Look back at the early James Bond movies: Bond was not a superhero. He lost many fights, and when he won it was often by using exotic gadgets, improvised weapons, or other forms of "cheating." His charm, wit, and sophistication were his primary attributes. He brought in real commandoes when needed. This model shifted over the years to the point where Bond became a Saturday morning serial style hero during the Pierce Brosnan years. And then there was Quantum of Solace, a nausea inducing series of quick cuts. I have no idea how it ended. I'd rather watch 90 minutes of Teletubbies than finish that one.

With this need for continuous action, Hollywood has forgotten the art of the buildup. Take Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example. The opening scene shows the origin of the One Ring, a big reveal that doesn't happen until midway through the first book. Through the first movie, the hobbits are seen sprinting across Middle Earth in an attempt to avoid any dull scenes. The resulting effect is claustrophobic; Middle Earth feels smaller than a single U.S. county. No time is wasted reciting poetry or enjoying beer and a good smoke, as in the books. It's action! Action! Action! John Milnius' Conan the Barbarian was more Tolkienesque than Jackson's trilogy.

Note that it doesn't take a huge amount of screen time to convey a sense of time and space. Westerns did this routinely for decades. There were also westerns that kept the actual action sequence time down to something realistic, relying on anticipation and drama to move the story forward. See High Noon for an example.

Finally, to see the power of an action thriller where the hero doesn't have any superpowers, check out the 1982 movie Vigilante -- a grittier, lower budget movie in the tradition of Death Wish. Vigilante features the most thrilling chase scene I have seen in any movie. The hero is just an ordinary guy, put through the ringer. He drives like a madman after the villain because he is truly mad, not because he is a professional driver. The plot up to this point is dark enough that it feels that the character could crash and that would be the end. And the camera was in the car. With a two million dollar budget, Vigilante packs more adrenaline than all the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies put together.

2. Entertainment for older children. Turn on your streaming service and search for child suitable fare. You get mostly shows and movies suitable for early elementary and preschool children. At least, that is what I found when my family was younger. I haven't checked recently. But back when I did check for such things, I found that Saturday morning cartoons had been replaced by informercials on the main broadcast networks. Ditto for after school programming. Gone were the cheap toy selling cartoons of the He Man variety. Gone were the reruns of kid friendly comedies (such as Gilligan's Island) and action shows (such as Lost in Space). Apparently, the crackdown on selling junk food to kids has made kid friendly fare unprofitable on broadcast television. As for PBS, PBS Kids is premised on the idea that childhood ends at 6.

OK, I may have missed where this niche went. I hate paying for cable or satellite TV. I just bought DVDs for my family, in true reactionary spirit. But I still suspect that there is a wide open market for better fare for preteens for the enterprising family values capitalist.

Speaking of PBS, it would be nice to mix in a bit of education with children's entertainment. You can teach quite a few snippets of history, science, engineering, civics, economics, and general wisdom without being pedantic or heavy handed. Stories and play are how children learned before there were schools.

I can think of rather few good examples from even the pre woke days. The science in most old science fiction was generally terrible. The Peanuts specials portrayed a world where adults were offscreen semi-alien beings. And way too many children's shows teach a delusional mix of self esteem and positive thinking. "If you can dream it you can do it" is utter bunk. One of the few bright spots in this regard was the Tennessee Tuxedo cartoon. The title character is a positive thinking penguin who repeatedly fails because he refuses to sit still and listen to the complete message from his mentor Phineas J. Whoopee. And, by the way, Mr. Whoopee gives some nice short educational lectures in each show, including lessons in technology.

Another bright spot can be found in a cartoon that was truly awful as entertainment: The Super Friends. Thanks to criticism by liberal do gooders complaining about violence in Saturday morning cartoons, the folks at Hanna-Barbera decided to water down the superhero genre by making the villains good intentioned -- in other words, liberals(!) The unintentional result was the most libertarian television series ever made. Too bad it was so dreadful.

3. Entertainment that is watchable by the entire family. Once upon a time, homes had only one television and there were only three networks. In those days the television networks could maximize their audience share by airing shows which attempted to entertain adults and children at the same time. The result was shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Get Smart, and Batman which featured a clever mix of physical comedy and biting social commentary.

This art extended to many movies as well. Disney cranked out quite a few such comedies from the mid 1950s through the 1970s: The Shaggy Dog, That Darned Cat, Gus, Superdad, The Boatniks, The World's Greatest Athlete, and the college comedies with Kurt Russell come to mind. After Walt Disney had a conflict with his unions, he turned rightward and gave us such gems as The Absent Minded Professor, and Son of Flubber -- movies that Ayn Rand could have written if she had a sense of humor.

4. Semi clean humor. Bawdy humor and fart jokes are easy to write. (And sometimes such fare can be educational. For example, every delusional school administrator who wants to let boys in dresses use the girl's restroom should be forced to watch Porkey's -- preferably Clockwork Orange style.) While I cheerfully admit to enjoying the naughty comedies featuring the early Saturday Night Live alumni and the like, later there began an arms race for ever cruder fare. At some point the yuks become more disgust than laughter. There is a market for cleaner fare, and not just for prudes or those who watch with the entire family. But such humor requires good writing, an art that is often underappreciated in Hollywood. (Note this difference between British and American television: in Britain, a show is "by" the writer, and this writing credit is usually right after the episode title. In America, a show is "written by" with the credit often buried.)

5. News that attempts to be objective. Imagine if there was an evening news program that was fair and balanced. Imagine if that show were to report the news and let the viewer decide... There is no such program or network today. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" and "We Report, You Decide" slogans were a sad joke. (Had Fox used the slogan "Providing Balance" they would have been honest. Fox plus one of the legacy news services would be sort of balanced, though at least in its early days, Fox had way too much commentary and not enough actual news.)

America needs a center right analog to Walter Cronkite. No bombastic lecturing. Just report the facts that the liberal outlets bury or suppress, and do it in a calm, but serious manner. Leave the commentary for guests on the program. Bring on experts from competing thinktanks and let them debate. Do what PBS should be doing, but isn't.

Whether this should be yet another news network or a news program associated with a broadcast network is an interesting question I cannot properly answer. I don't watch broadcast television. But old people do, and old people vote... Getting old people to switch networks might be a challenge, but maybe a network with enough family programming as described above could get traction: something to watch with the grandchildren...

6. Some real science fiction. This idea is not reactionary; it's from my long term wish list going back decades. It is rare for movie or television science to be anything like the written medium. Most fare is either horror or superhero fiction with a veneer of sciency prattle. Most directors and producers are science illiterate, and have egos too big to listen to their consultants or the original authors when they adapt written science fiction. (Amusingly, one of the rare exceptions was Gilligan's Island. The Professor's scientific gibberish is quite good, thanks to the fact that executive producer Sherwood Schwartz had a master's degree in biological sciences [see IMDB])

Admittedly, science fiction is inherently expensive: lot's of futuristic and alien worlds to simulate. But thanks to advances in computer power, the price is way down. And do note that for true science fiction aficionados, a good story done with cheap props (classic Dr. Who, Dark Star, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes) is better than a bad story done with a big budget (Independence Day, Avatar).

As for good writing, there is a huge body of reactionary stories available for movie and miniseries adaptation. John Campbell set the tone of personal competence, independence, and responsibility for the genre that lasted for decades beyond the Golden Age. Even left wing writers were anti woke. Part of this is inherent in the medium: the cold vacuum of space doesn't care about your feelings; there is no one to sue out in the frontier. Hollywood has barely tapped this goldmine. For some reason, Hollywood mainly wants to adapt Phillip K. Dick stories, which aren't very good. (The movies from his stories are much better.) If you want fiction relevant to our current age, try C. M. Kornbluth and Jerry Pournelle. Kornbluth took on the theme of immigraton and demographics from multiple angles. Pournelle's social breakdown fiction from the 1970s is quite relevant, given that we are repeating the early 70s as I write this. And if you have the budget for it, the Niven and Pournelle collaborations Lucifer's Hammer, and Footfall scream out to be turned into Irwin Allen style disaster movies or miniseries.

And if you like Bond movies but don't like the woke direction the franchise is heading, check out Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry stories. Dominic Flandry is a Bond like character defending a decaying Terran Empire that's loosely modeled on the Roman Empire. The capital is infected with the Too Sophistic to be Patriotic sorts of people that inhabit Washington today. You need not fear any copyright conflicts with the owners of the Bond franchise: the earliest Flandry stories predate the earliest Bond novels.

Or Just Promote the Classic Stuff

If creating new entertainment is too much work, there is also the possibility of just reusing what has already been created. Netflix used to be a great service for those who wanted to focus on old entertainment, but they started neglecting their by mail service, and their streaming service replaced the old movies with cheap fare from abroad. Then the mail got slow due to COVID-19. Now, Amazon is the better service. Their library of old movies and television for streaming is enormous, though sometimes they forget the dub track for foreign movies, and old science fiction is corrupted with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 snark track. Amazon has made it easy to search for interesting fare via its IMDB service.

So you can just boycott Woke Hollywood using Amazon -- for now. But what if Amazon goes fully woke? And the Thought Police in general are wanting to take away our history wholesale. Relying on the cloud is fragile.

There is something to be said for stockpiling physical media. For old television shows this is a feasible strategy at the personal level. (And if you have children you should. As a proud member of The Patriarchy, I made a point of not displaying idiot TV dad s to my progeny. And besides, the golden age for TV physical comedy was the 1960s. Don't deprive your children.) For movies, this gets a bit expensive and bulky. A shared solution is more efficient.

Yes, I'm talking about reviving the video store. But this time instead of featuring the blockbusters, stockpile the old stuff. And maybe instead of renting videos, sell them and buy them back. With this model you don't need memberships. Everything can be done in cash. The model is suitable for vacationers renting a beach house or a mountain cabin. It works for paranoids who don't want there watching habits recorded in a computer database, and paranoids who don't have a "smart" TV. To them we turn next.